I grew up with cats – my parents had several cats when I was born, and reportedly, one cat even liked to sleep in my crib (which is totally bad parenting, I know, but whatever, I survived). I always tended to view the cats as my siblings (I’m an only child) and apparently, when I was a toddler and getting up to some sh-t, I would blame the cats whenever I was caught. “Kitty did it,” is what I would say when I was caught doing something wrong. That’s where we are now, in our political landscape. We’re in the Kitty Did It phase of the Trump presidency. Donald Trump cannot accept responsibility for anything, he cannot be criticized in the least, he is incapable of simply owning a mistake or admitting that he lied, or offering a half-assed apology for sexually assaulting 16 women (that we know of).

To recap, with only a month left in the 2016 election, the Access Hollywood tape was leaked. In the tape, Donald Trump and Billy Bush are speaking on a “hot mic” before they taped a segment on a soap opera. In between bragging about moving in on Nancy O’Dell “like a bitch,” Trump also said: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.” OR DID HE?

President Donald Trump has questioned the authenticity of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which he bragged about being able to grope women, The New York Times reported over the weekend, despite the fact that Trump immediately apologized for his remarks when the video surfaced.

Trump’s decision to stick with Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore despite sexual harassment allegations against him is rooted in the President’s own sexual harassment scandal during the 2016 election.

“He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after,” the Times reported. “He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently.”

CNN has not independently confirmed the New York Times’ reporting. The White House has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

It would not surprise me. It would not surprise me that Trump is now claiming that the whole thing is “fake.” Remember, there’s no bigger clue to the veracity of any claim than Trump declaring it to be “fake.” The more he cries “fake news,” the more you know it’s real. The more he tells people that the Access Hollywood tape was fake, you know that he probably said a lot worse to many other people.

When asked about this in the Monday press briefing, Sarah Sanders tried to side-step the questions repeatedly, saying that Trump hasn’t changed his position (???) and then, when pressed further, said: “Look. I said that [Trump] already addressed it, and that we didn’t have any updates on that. I said what he didn’t like and what he found troubling were the accounts that are being reported now.” If I use my Sarah Huckabee Sanders decoder ring, I think she’s saying that Trump maybe admits that the tape is really his voice but he’s still denying that he sexually assaulted all of those women. As in, he takes issue with the idea that the Access Hollywood tape is an admission that he sexually assaulted women. Bullsh-t.

In any case, even Access Hollywood has gotten into the “fact-checking Bigly” business. Natalie Morales said, on camera, last night: “We wanted to clear something up that has been reported across the media landscape. Let us make this perfectly clear — the tape is very real. Remember his excuse at the time was ‘locker-room talk.’ He said every one of those words.”